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In 15 years as a freelance communications business operator, Michelle Nahanee was becoming a victim of her own success.

Her company, Michelle Nahanee Communications Design, mostly handles work for first nations communities — issue-based projects such as a report, a brochure, a poster. Recent jobs include an HIV-prevention campaign, and information for aboriginal youth about gang violence.

She loves the work, but there was one problem — she is too busy to spend time figuring out how to expand from a one-person, home-based operation into a larger company with broader scope and employees to share the workload.

That could soon change.

Nahanee’s company is one of 10 selected by the Vancity Community Foundation for a pilot project, announced Wednesday, that is pairing women entrepreneurs with business coaches who will help them develop growth plans.

The 10 are part of a substantial trend. A study by one Canadian university found that women start more businesses than men, that 91 per cent of self-employed women have post-secondary education, and that 19 per cent belong to a visible minority. Half have children living at home. The top sectors they operate in are professions including scientific and technical services, health care and social assistance, and trade.

The Vancity program, titled Women Entrepreneurs: Financing Opportunities for Growth Project, is funded by Status of Women Canada. It will run for five months, at which time all the entrepreneurs will have an opportunity to pitch their expansion plans to a panel comprised of Vancity account managers and other financiers.

“The purpose of this particular initiative is to connect with those women who want to grow but need some help doing so,” said Joanne Norris, project lead for Vancity Community Foundation. The businesses selected are past the start-up stage and have what Norris described as “proven business viability and opportunities to grow.”

“But the entrepreneurs need some help with that strategy, with documenting it, with getting prepared to go for financing.”

The businesses in the pilot range from lumber trading to home décor retail to communications, social media, marketing, textbook rental, manufacturing of environmentally friendly feminine hygiene products, video production and flower and floral services.

Nahanee applied to the program in hopes of learning how to build a team and expand her client base. Ideally, she would like to obtain financing to enable her to hire junior designers and administrative staff to “free me up to go out and get the business,” Nahanee said.

“I make things look great. I take a report and I do photography and illustration, and design the cover, the layout, send it back out into the world as something people actually read. I do reports, brochures, posters. I do some web-based work.

“As a one-person business I’m always too busy working on my contracts to really spend time creating my vision statement, great business tools — I’ve never had time to map that out.”

Twice a month she meets with her mentor, who helps “focus my energy into making that expansion plan instead of just getting through the day-to-day business.”

Julie Wu, who runs the Orling and Wu home-decorating store in Gastown with her fiance, has ambitions of expanding the company internationally. To expand into other markets, particularly those outside of Canada, the couple will need a solid plan for dealing with different tax systems, labour laws, customs offices ­— that plan will also be critical for time management, and for keeping their books balanced.

“The mentor we have is amazing. She is looking at our financials and she’s making sure we’re recording the right things and building the right systems for the next phase of growth. She’s helping us to look at growth strategies, what we need to do to be at the next level,” Wu said.

Norris noted that while women start businesses at a faster rate than men, they often don’t grow them as big or as quickly as do male entrepreneurs.

“A lot of women who start businesses may run them for a little while — owner-operator type businesses. Then they may want to grow and have ambitions to do so, but don’t necessarily know how to do that. That’s a broad barrier,” Nahanee said. “One of the things we found out through this project, is that often there’s quite a reluctance to even go in the door of a credit union or a bank. Often women think they have to have all their ducks in a row, everything to a T before they can go and talk to someone – which isn’t necessarily the case. You want to build that relationship [with an account manager], but often they don’t think that way.”

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